In May 2009 the World Food Program (WFP) requested support for the estimation of population figures for three internally displaced person (IDP) camps in West Darfur based on very high resolution satellite data. Two of these camps are located close to El-Geneina, the provincial capital of West Darfur. Beyond the analysis of these camps the overall objective of the request was to assess appropriate methods and efforts for a frequent monitoring of all the IDP camps in West Darfur to be carried out by the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC).
In support of this task, the cluster Humanitarian Relief & Reconstruction of the GMES-Project LIMES (http://www.fp6-limes.eu/) was involved to jointly evaluating different approaches in an effort coupling classic production and R&D methods in close cooperation with WFP staff based in El-Geneina.
Analyses were performed using on the one hand, object-based image analysis combining segmentation, class modelling and knowledge representation techniques, while others were based on morphological image processing. For validation purposes statistical methods have been applied to compare the relative convergence of the results of all methods. In case of the future development of a transferable approach for building extraction, a validation based on ground truth data of several camps remains essential. This paper presents a status report of a study that has not been finalised yet.